Dotsthavesp I wanted to but couldn't!

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

calvinnme Peter Graves is a federal agent trying to find out the source of the amphetamines that is killing and driving insane so many long haul truck drivers. An opening segment shows one of the long haul truck drivers trying to stay awake and downing "bennies" as they call them here to the point where he sees cars where there are none, and swerves, crashing his truck and dying, grabbing the viewer's attention.Tom Kaylor (Graves) goes undercover as a student truck driver. He moves into the rooming house run by the widow of the dead truck driver from the opening segment.Tom keeps asking for bennies from people who he thinks might be selling them, and getting rebuffed - practically with a sermon - every time. His first partner on a long drive actually opens up to Tom about the bennie business and how the pills are killers and how he is going to ask around to see if he can find out who is supplying them. He winds up beaten to death.There are a number of suspects as usual in this kind of film, and it keeps you guessing as to whether they are in on the pill business or just afraid of crossing those who are. The end is rather anti-climactic as the person who is the guilty party doesn't evoke either anger or sympathy from the audience. Plus the opening segment makes you believe that Kaylor is after a "Mr. Big", and this person hardly comes across like that.The best part of this film is seeing Chuck Connors of "The Rifleman" TV fame, which is a role that is to come only a year later,as a perpetually hyped up hepcat amphetamine addict of a truck driver, "Mink", who also lives in the boarding house with Tom. It's worth the price of admission just to see him hammily - and figuratively - climbing the walls.I'm giving this five points for Chuck Connors' cheesy performance and for the great roadhouse atmosphere of a bygone era - of boarding houses, transistor radios, cramped ma and pa diners with friendly service, of long haul working stiffs just trying to make ends meet. Then there is the sympathetic treatment the actual addicts are given. Considerable time is taken to show how some of the addicts got trapped in the web of addiction with a good dose of empathy.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** FDA Agent Tom Kayler, Peter Graves, is sent undercover as a student trucker to uncover a drug ring that providing truckers amphetamines known as "Bennies" to keep them awake during their long and tedious cross country hauls. It doesn't take long for Kayler to get his trucker partner Wally Morse, Ron Engle, to open up on what's going on in the trucking industry in him being addicted to "Bennie" himself and not keeping it, by popping them all the time, secret. In Kayler trying to find out the identity of the Mr. Big who's behind the drug smuggling operation causes Wally, who just couldn't keep his mouth shut, to be murdered by Mr. Big's thugs for talking too much.Kayler for his part keeps on digging and finally gets a lead with his new trucking partner hipster and beatnik like Mink Reynolds,Chuck Conners. Mink is so strung out on "Bennies" that it's a miracle that he can drive a tricycle much less an 18 wheeler. Minks addiction to "Bennies"soon lead to him freaking out and attacking Kayler that lead him to him, after Kayler flattened him, ending up in the hospital emergency ward suffering from a serious case severe drug with-drawls. Soon it becomes evident that Mr. Big is working out of Dunc Clayton's, Robert B. Williams, truck stop that's a popular watering hole for Mink who seems to get his supply of "Bennies" there. With Kayler getting too close to the source, Mr. Big or Mr. Brown as he's known, of who's behind the drug ring he's set up to be whacked like Wally was by one of Mr.Big's top henchmen. ***SPOILERS*** As we and Kayler soon find out this drug operation a lot bigger then he even imagined. Big enough to have him put his guard down in becoming deeply involved with with the person, not Mr.Big, who's been secretly running it right from the start! Never getting his hair mussed up or his fine tailored and pressed clothes, as a trucker, soiled Peter Graves as DEA Agent Tom Kayler almost single handedly puts an end to this drug operation! But not without the help of Dunc Clayton who changed sides when convinced, by Kayler, that he'll be iced along with Kayler by his drug pushing cohorts. The ending has a still immaculately dressed, this time with a suite and tie, Kayler confront the real Mr.Big who, in after trying to bribe Kayler to lay off, doesn't realize that he not only has the goods on him but also has the cops and DEA Agents waiting outside about arrest and cuff him!

dougdoepke Truckers depend on illegal amphetamines to stay awake over long distances, causing a number of road accidents. So the government assigns an undercover agent to expose the criminal connections.I expect this film amounts to an offspring of 1955's Man With a Golden Arm, the first post-war film to deal seriously with drug addiction. More directly is 1956's Bigger Than Life that dramatizes the maddening effects of a new prescription drug on an over-worked schoolteacher (James Mason). Up to 1955, drug addiction was pretty much taboo among non-exploitation filmmakers. So this minor oddity was dealing with an unusual topic not conventionally seen on the screen. (As a teen seeing the movie on initial release, I recall being puzzled by the topic).The movie itself is standard Hollywood expose—the clean-cut gov't agent (Graves), the nefarious criminal ring, a mysterious headman, plus a winsome romantic interest (Powers). Still, the director is Joe Newman who could occasionally rise above the potboiler as I think he does here with some effective touches. Note the well-played surprise twist, along with pill-popping Chuck Connors, a really long way from his sober-sided role in The Rifleman. In fact, I wouldn't have believed Connors' giddy performance if I hadn't seen it. Thanks to the several twists, unusual subject matter, and the manic Connors, the movie remains an oddly memorable potboiler, despite the lowly origins.

telegonus Capable genre director Joe Newman directed this magnetically tawdry tale of a federal agent trying to crack a drug ring that preys on long-haul truckers. This is no French Connection, but it's a fascinating glimpse of a bygone era, and if one has a taste for low-budget AA features of the fifties this one is definitely worth a look. Peter Graves makes a fine Viking hero. There's a pseudo-adultness here of the sort one used to find in cheap paperback novels that were basically semi-porn but masquerading (or trying to) as exposes of one sort or another. As with Dragnet, one has to have a certain kind of empathy to get into the spirit of this sort of thing. If you do, this one will reward you handsomely.